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Data centers and high performance computing have relied on Moore's law scaling to achieve petaflop scale compute capability within feasible power budgets. However, semiconductor scaling, abated by increasingly stringent power constraints, growing manufacturing variability, and ultimately restricted by fundamental physical limits, is predicted to end soon [8, 48, 54]. Moreover, modern data center power consumption is predicted to increase by a factor of three to 661 TWh within the same time frame [6].
Niobium (Nb) based superconductor electronics, an existing and mature technology, enables fundamentally different tradeoffs in performance and power. Conventional superconductor electronics, however, have been limited to small applications such as high frequency analog to digital conversion [28, 33, 37], low latency network switches [17, 23, 60, 63, 64], and embedded space applications [35, 42, 68]. Small scale digital electronics have been demonstrated, but with limited applicability to general computer applications.